Questions to ask before starting an E-Commerce project or online store

Far too often, clients and developers vastly underestimate the complexity involved for their simple online store or E-Commerce project. It might seem basic: show some products/services, add them to a cart, make payment, & ship... The reality however is often much more involved. Options, discounts, gifts, shipping options, referrals, and more combine together in a way that the complexity can quickly grow exponentially. With this complexity, custom-built solutions or online stores built by individuals prove inadequate or get so convoluted as features are added they become impossible to administer, maintain, and update.

Sometimes a few PayPal buttons or a basic shopping cart will meet your needs. But usually, you really need a really well-architected solution that has an active and strong development team behind it, a nice array of features, and an extensible architecture that will allow it to grow to meet the needs of the customer. Fortunately, the are some really great open-source E-Commerce solutions(Magento and NOPCommerce are two of our favorites) and affordable commercial E-Commerce offerings (AbleCommerce is our current favorite) available.

The key, is making sure that early in the process, you are properly anticipating the current and future needs of the client. This article lays out the list of que
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One of our clients for which we built an AbleCommerce based E-Commerce site needed the ability to have certain items ship as a completely separate shipment from any other items in the users order, including if the user order multiples of the same item. AbleCommerce doesn't implement this functionality so we had to customize some of the existing functionality...
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